Nip Rumors in the Bud: Retrieval-Guided Topic-Level Adaptation for Test-Time Fake News Video Detection

Fake News Video Detection (FNVD) is critical for social stability. Existing methods typically assume consistent news topic distribution between training and test phases, failing to detect fake news videos tied to emerging events and unseen topics. To bridge this gap, we introduce RADAR, the first framework that enables test-time adaptation to unseen news videos. RADAR pioneers a new retrieval-guided adaptation paradigm that leverages stable (source-close) videos from the target domain to guide robust adaptation of semantically related but unstable instances. Specifically, we propose an Entropy Selection-Based Retrieval mechanism that provides videos with stable (low-entropy), relevant references for adaptation. We also introduce a Stable Anchor-Guided Alignment module that explicitly aligns unstable instances' representations to the source domain via distribution-level matching with their stable references, mitigating severe domain discrepancies. Finally, our novel Target-Domain Aware Self-Training paradigm can generate informative pseudo-labels augmented by stable references, capturing varying and imbalanced category distributions in the target domain and enabling RADAR to adapt to the fast-changing label distributions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RADAR achieves superior performance for test-time FNVD, enabling strong on-the-fly adaptation to unseen fake news video topics.

GloCTM: Cross-Lingual Topic Modeling via a Global Context Space

Cross-lingual topic modeling seeks to uncover coherent and semantically aligned topics across languages - a task central to multilingual understanding. Yet most existing models learn topics in disjoint, language-specific spaces and rely on alignment mechanisms (e.g., bilingual dictionaries) that often fail to capture deep cross-lingual semantics, resulting in loosely connected topic spaces. Moreover, these approaches often overlook the rich semantic signals embedded in multilingual pretrained representations, further limiting their ability to capture fine-grained alignment. We introduce GloCTM (Global Context Space for Cross-Lingual Topic Model), a novel framework that enforces cross-lingual topic alignment through a unified semantic space spanning the entire model pipeline. GloCTM constructs enriched input representations by expanding bag-of-words with cross-lingual lexical neighborhoods, and infers topic proportions using both local and global encoders, with their latent representations aligned through internal regularization. At the output level, the global topic-word distribution, defined over the combined vocabulary, structurally synchronizes topic meanings across languages. To further ground topics in deep semantic space, GloCTM incorporates a Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) loss that aligns the latent topic space with multilingual contextual embeddings. Experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that GloCTM significantly improves topic coherence and cross-lingual alignment, outperforming strong baselines.

F-Actor: Controllable Conversational Behaviour in Full-Duplex Models

Spoken conversational systems require more than accurate speech generation to have human-like conversations: to feel natural and engaging, they must produce conversational behaviour that adapts dynamically to the context. Current spoken conversational systems, however, rarely allow such customization, limiting their naturalness and usability. In this work, we present the first open, instruction-following full-duplex conversational speech model that can be trained efficiently under typical academic resource constraints. By keeping the audio encoder frozen and finetuning only the language model, our model requires just 2,000 hours of data, without relying on large-scale pretraining or multi-stage optimization. The model can follow explicit instructions to control speaker voice, conversation topic, conversational behaviour (e.g., backchanneling and interruptions), and dialogue initiation. We propose a single-stage training protocol and systematically analyze design choices. Both the model and training code will be released to enable reproducible research on controllable full-duplex speech systems.

From SERPs to Sound: How Search Engine Result Pages and AI-generated Podcasts Interact to Influence User Attitudes on Controversial Topics

Compared to search engine result pages (SERPs), AI-generated podcasts represent a relatively new and relatively more passive modality of information consumption, delivering narratives in a naturally engaging format. As these two media increasingly converge in everyday information-seeking behavior, it is essential to explore how their interaction influences user attitudes, particularly in contexts involving controversial, value-laden, and often debated topics. Addressing this need, we aim to understand how information mediums of present-day SERPs and AI-generated podcasts interact to shape the opinions of users. To this end, through a controlled user study (N=483), we investigated user attitudinal effects of consuming information via SERPs and AI-generated podcasts, focusing on how the sequence and modality of exposure shape user opinions. A majority of users in our study corresponded to attitude change outcomes, and we found an effect of sequence on attitude change. Our results further revealed a role of viewpoint bias and the degree of topic controversiality in shaping attitude change, although we found no effect of individual moderators.

LLM-Assisted Pseudo-Relevance Feedback

Query expansion is a long-standing technique to mitigate vocabulary mismatch in ad hoc Information Retrieval. Pseudo-relevance feedback methods, such as RM3, estimate an expanded query model from the top-ranked documents, but remain vulnerable to topic drift when early results include noisy or tangential content. Recent approaches instead prompt Large Language Models to generate synthetic expansions or query variants. While effective, these methods risk hallucinations and misalignment with collection-specific terminology. We propose a hybrid alternative that preserves the robustness and interpretability of classical PRF while leveraging LLM semantic judgement. Our method inserts an LLM-based filtering stage prior to RM3 estimation: the LLM judges the documents in the initial top-$k$ ranking, and RM3 is computed only over those accepted as relevant. This simple intervention improves over blind PRF and a strong baseline across several datasets and metrics.

Combating Spurious Correlations in Graph Interpretability via Self-Reflection

Interpretable graph learning has recently emerged as a popular research topic in machine learning. The goal is to identify the important nodes and edges of an input graph that are crucial for performing a specific graph reasoning task. A number of studies have been conducted in this area, and various benchmark datasets have been proposed to facilitate evaluation. Among them, one of the most challenging is the Spurious-Motif benchmark, introduced at ICLR 2022. The datasets in this synthetic benchmark are deliberately designed to include spurious correlations, making it particularly difficult for models to distinguish truly relevant structures from misleading patterns. As a result, existing methods exhibit significantly worse performance on this benchmark compared to others. In this paper, we focus on improving interpretability on the challenging Spurious-Motif datasets. We demonstrate that the self-reflection technique, commonly used in large language models to tackle complex tasks, can also be effectively adapted to enhance interpretability in datasets with strong spurious correlations. Specifically, we propose a self-reflection framework that can be integrated with existing interpretable graph learning methods. When such a method produces importance scores for each node and edge, our framework feeds these predictions back into the original method to perform a second round of evaluation. This iterative process mirrors how large language models employ self-reflective prompting to reassess their previous outputs. We further analyze the reasons behind this improvement from the perspective of graph representation learning, which motivates us to propose a fine-tuning training method based on this feedback mechanism.

AI Co-Scientist for Knowledge Synthesis in Medical Contexts: A Proof of Concept

Research waste in biomedical science is driven by redundant studies, incomplete reporting, and the limited scalability of traditional evidence synthesis workflows. We present an AI co-scientist for scalable and transparent knowledge synthesis based on explicit formalization of Population, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome, and Study design (PICOS). The platform integrates relational storage, vector-based semantic retrieval, and a Neo4j knowledge graph. Evaluation was conducted on dementia-sport and non-communicable disease corpora. Automated PICOS compliance and study design classification from titles and abstracts were performed using a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory baseline and a transformer-based multi-task classifier fine-tuned from PubMedBERT. Full-text synthesis employed retrieval-augmented generation with hybrid vector and graph retrieval, while BERTopic was used to identify thematic structure, redundancy, and evidence gaps. The transformer model achieved 95.7% accuracy for study design classification with strong agreement against expert annotations, while the Bi-LSTM achieved 87% accuracy for PICOS compliance detection. Retrieval-augmented generation outperformed non-retrieval generation for queries requiring structured constraints, cross-study integration, and graph-based reasoning, whereas non-retrieval approaches remained competitive for high-level summaries. Topic modeling revealed substantial thematic redundancy and identified underexplored research areas. These results demonstrate that PICOS-aware and explainable natural language processing can improve the scalability, transparency, and efficiency of evidence synthesis. The proposed architecture is domain-agnostic and offers a practical framework for reducing research waste across biomedical disciplines.

TWeddit : A Dataset of Triggering Stories Predominantly Shared by Women on Reddit

Warning: This paper may contain examples and topics that may be disturbing to some readers, especially survivors of miscarriage and sexual violence. People affected by abortion, miscarriage, or sexual violence often share their experiences on social media to express emotions and seek support. On public platforms like Reddit, where users can post long, detailed narratives (up to 40,000 characters), readers may be exposed to distressing content. Although Reddit allows manual trigger warnings, many users omit them due to limited awareness or uncertainty about which categories apply. There is scarcity of datasets on Reddit stories labeled for triggering experiences. We propose a curated Reddit dataset, TWeddit, covering triggering experiences related to issues majorly faced by women. Our linguistic analyses show that annotated stories in TWeddit express distinct topics and moral foundations, making the dataset useful for a wide range of future research.

The Growing Gains and Pains of Iterative Web Corpora Crawling: Insights from South Slavic CLASSLA-web 2.0 Corpora

Crawling national top-level domains has proven to be highly effective for collecting texts in less-resourced languages. This approach has been recently used for South Slavic languages and resulted in the largest general corpora for this language group: the CLASSLA-web 1.0 corpora. Building on this success, we established a continuous crawling infrastructure for iterative national top-level domain crawling across South Slavic and related webs. We present the first outcome of this crawling infrastructure - the CLASSLA-web 2.0 corpus collection, with substantially larger web corpora containing 17.0 billion words in 38.1 million texts in seven languages: Bosnian, Bulgarian, Croatian, Macedonian, Montenegrin, Serbian, and Slovenian. In addition to genre categories, the new version is also automatically annotated with topic labels. Comparing CLASSLA-web 2.0 with its predecessor reveals that only one-fifth of the texts overlap, showing that re-crawling after just two years yields largely new content. However, while the new web crawls bring growing gains, we also notice growing pains - a manual inspection of top domains reveals a visible degradation of web content, as machine-generated sites now contribute a significant portion of texts.

Industry-Aligned Granular Topic Modeling

Topic modeling has extensive applications in text mining and data analysis across various industrial sectors. Although the concept of granularity holds significant value for business applications by providing deeper insights, the capability of topic modeling methods to produce granular topics has not been thoroughly explored. In this context, this paper introduces a framework called TIDE, which primarily provides a novel granular topic modeling method based on large language models (LLMs) as a core feature, along with other useful functionalities for business applications, such as summarizing long documents, topic parenting, and distillation. Through extensive experiments on a variety of public and real-world business datasets, we demonstrate that TIDE's topic modeling approach outperforms modern topic modeling methods, and our auxiliary components provide valuable support for dealing with industrial business scenarios. The TIDE framework is currently undergoing the process of being open sourced.